For the past few years, especially since Jman was born, I would have written a list of personal resolutions for the new year: lose weight, get organized in my routines and at home, have a set time to read the Bible and pray, etc. And this year it would be the same (well, the lose weight would have to wait for another six months), but I have not wanted to because it makes me feel bad.
In the past I have gotten started on my resolutions, but then I stop, sometimes starting back again, and then stopping again. For good. Something happens. It can be an illness, a couple days out of town and I am blown off course, but honestly it's because I lose stamina and sheer will. I don't have the passion to go on. However, the more and more I think about my resolutions and the way I approach them is this: I am very good at planning what I need to do and getting all sorts of ideas to 'better' myself and implement my goals: I get all the books I can find at the library, find more online, buy new day planners, get them all in order...but it's actually DOING it that just is so hard! And then I feel like a failure. So right now I do not like resolutions because everyday I am thinking of things I have to resolve, in me, my children, my home....and it's enough to make me feel like I never get anything done.
The good and best thought about resolutions- the truth of why I keep failing:
Typically when I think of new year's resolutions I am thinking of external changes, what I want to "see" or "do" differently. But there is another side to resolutions, and it's the most important one. Wanting to start "fresh" and "new" has spiritual implications. Part of us, our souls, yearns for more, desires more for us, for our life.
For I hear Him, the One who strives to get my attention, day after day, saying to me, and from the beginning of time, that I want the wrong things, I am going about it the wrong way! The things I want to change around me are not the most important usually, nor are they the ones that will bring me true happiness and peace. The truth is that my resolutions seem to always fall through because they are rooted in my own selfish desires. I desire my own perfectness, and not God's. Even reading His Word is about being 'better" at being Christian, and that is not what I want and believe Christian to mean- it is simply who I am by Grace. Nothing I can or could ever do. I had written, months ago now,a short little note that I kept as a word document on my computer:
Seek peace, not perfection. Perfection is not peace. We think we will have peace when we arrive to what we believe will be perfection (a perfect body? a perfect house? perfect spouse and kids? a perfect me?) whereas we won't ever achieve that and thus live without peace....
Ps. 34:14 "Seek peace and pursue it"
Peace is a gift God wants to give, a fruit of His SpiritMy resolutions fail not only because I am trying to do it all by myself, but it's all about myself! I need to be about His kingdom, and not about a perfectly synchronized house routine and wonderfully behaved children (that reflect how wonderfully I am.) My first resolution must be not about me but about Him. And perhaps I won't need resolutions anymore, for He will take care of 'all the rest':
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Matt. 6:31-33
So to all those making resolutions, like myself, and hoping for a better year: seek first His kingdom. And take it one day at a time!
Peace be with you.
